“Red eye” is the appearance of red pupils in a captured image that occurs when the face of a person is photographed under low ambient light. In particular, when the photographic flash is very close to the camera lens, light from the flash is reflected off the fundus at the back of the eyeball of the subject being photographed and back towards the camera. Red eye is a photographic effect that can make the eyes of a person being photographed look unnatural in the captured image. For this reason, many algorithms have been developed to detect the presence of red eyes in the captured image and to perform appropriate corrections so that the subject being photographed appears more natural in the image.
However, the possibility exists for a detection algorithm to mistakenly identify other red objects in the captured image as being a red eye and thus be in need of correction. To reduce the occurrence of these “false alarms”, parameters of the detection algorithm may be modified so that, for example, red shapes that only approach the shape of a red eye are not falsely identified as such. However, a drawback of such a technique is that in the event that a genuine red eye artifact is present in the captured image, but perhaps does not meet each and every condition for being a genuine red eye artifact, the algorithm may incorrectly determine that a genuine red eye artifact is not present.
Embodiments of the invention described herein address the above-identified and other shortcomings of conventional red eye detection schemes.